A tall left-handed opener who batted with his bottom inelegantly stuck out towards square-leg, Chris Broad was an unusually single-minded and ambitious county cricketer. His occasional gracelessness was the flip-side of his impressive determination, and in 1983 he left his home-town club Gloucestershire for Nottinghamshire, whingeing that their unambitiousness had held him back. England rewarded this theoretically frowned-on move by picking him at once. This paid off spectacularly against the weak Australian team of 1986-87 when Broad equalled Jack Hobbs and Wally Hammond by scoring centuries in three successive Tests of an Ashes series. He scored a further 139 in the dreary Sydney bicentenary Test a year later but smashed the stumps down after being bowled. And when he was seen mouthing off after being given lbw at Lord's, he was dropped - ostensibly for loss of form, but the England management was getting increasingly tough-minded after the free-for-all of the Ian Botham era, and petulance was out of fashion: Broad only ever played two more Tests. Later, he became more serene but less effective, returning in peace to Gloucestershire and then joining the BBC TV commentary team before it was disbanded. His commentary was as well-honed as his batting, though his flair for it was less obvious. His subsequent reincarnation as an ICC match referee was a classic poacher-turned-gamekeeper situation.
Matthew Engel

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